The Cape/Observer/Comica graphic short story prize 2014 enter now!
When Mary Talbot finished writing her graphic memoir-come-biography, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes, a collaboration with her acclaimed comics artist husband, Bryan Talbot it partly tells the story of James Joyce's doomed daughter, Lucia, and went on to win the Costa biography prize for 2012 she didn't rest on her laurels; rather, she began looking around for her next project almost immediately. "I didn't want to do any kind of sequel," she says. "I certainly didn't want to write Dotter: the University Years [the memoir section of Dotter is concerned with her childhood, but she grew up to be an academic]. I wanted something that would be very absorbing and take up a lot of time. I realised that I knew very little about the suffragette movement, so I started looking into it and I was soon completely hooked."
But when she finished writing her "script", she had a problem on her hands. Bryan, who had been responsible for all the artwork in Dotter, was already deep into the writing of the next volume in his steampunk series Grandville , starring detective inspector Archie LeBrock of Scotland Yard, an anthropomorphic badger. "I wanted to finish it because the Grandville books take a hell of a long time to do," he says. "So once I'd received Mary's script, and broken it down into panels, I suggested bringing someone else on board to do the artwork. It worked like this: I did all the rough layouts on computer, indicating where figures should go, their facial expressions, their body language. Then I emailed them to Kate. I like to use the analogy of a film. If Mary was the screenwriter, I was the director and Kate was the performer." The Kate in question is Kate Charlesworth, the illustrator and cartoonist, and the finished result is a thrilling graphic novel, Sally Heathcote: Suffragette .
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